Like most political-celebrity appearances on Saturday Night Live, Sarah Palin’s didn’t really live up to the original skits, nor could you expect it to. The thing with cameos like this is that the main payoff is the announcement that the candidate is doing the show. The actual performance is more a formality: the politician gets to be a good sport, SNL gets the kind of news validation it loves.
Palin’s not an actor, but she has stage presence, and seemed much more comfortable putting her hands in the air for Amy Poehler’s rap sketch than I’m guessing Joe Biden would have been. The skits themselves, both of them, were fine, but had to try to walk the line between being unpalatable to the political guest and being totally boring.
And so, using SNL’s default position, they went about a half-dozen kinds of meta on us. Alec Baldwin mistook Palin for Tina Fey—nice, awkward “Caribou Barbie” moment—they wrote in Mark Wahlberg’s feud with Andy Samberg, and the lame, stereotyped rap number (Eskimos, moose and all) on Weekend Update ended on the note that it was supposed to be lame and stereotyped.
Yet it was kind of a sly stroke of subversion to premise the first sketch, with Tina Fey as Palin on the kind of press conference that, in real life, she has given exactly as often as she has appeared on SNL, and for about the same amount of time: Friday, she gave her first on-camera press conference since becoming a VP candidate a month and a half ago, for all of seven minutes. “I just didn’t think it was a realistic depiction of how one of my press conferences woulda gone,” she told Lorne Michaels during the sketch, taking some poetic license with the plural.
I’m not sure whether it was more of a coup for SNL to make that joke right in front of Palin (Fey notably shared little screen time with the real thing except to quickly skitter offstage past her), or for Palin to get credit for good-humoredly joking about evading the media—while continuing to evade the media. “Thank you. Now I’m not gonna take any of your questions but I do want to take this opportunity to say: Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
Good one, Gov. Palin! Say, time for a follow-up question? Gov. Palin? Gov. Palin…?